Declare

fibers from the remaining rope-end and used them to tie the short length to the crosspiece and pommel of the dagger, in a loop.
    The result was an ankh , though the loop was bisected by the dagger’s grip. Hale could hear Elena loudly reciting the Ave Maria in Spanish behind him, and he took a deep breath and tried to whisper some syllables of the Latin Pater Noster —and then he gripped the dagger by the base of the blade and stood up, lifting the makeshift ankh over his head—and he had to push the thing up through the air, as if through magnetic resistance.
    For an instant all thought and identity were blown out of Hale’s head, and his knees sagged and he would have fallen if the ankh had not suddenly been pulling upward in his fist; then the intensity of the thing’s surprise was abruptly gone, and Hale was again self-aware, a tiny sentient presumption in the face of something like a god.
    He staggered and swung his upraised arm to the left to steady himself—the ankh could only be dragged slowly through the nearly unyielding air, like tugging at a big gyroscope—
    —And with a shrill whistling that lashed spray up from the street, the whirlwind leaned over that way, seeming to overbalance the sky. Numbly, Hale flexed all the muscles in his arm and shoulder to force the ankh across the other way, to starboard—and the whirl-wind stood up straight against the clouds and then swayed out over the bombed lots to the north.
    “What,” shouted Cassagnac shrilly to be heard over the wind and the drumming percussion—the man was frowning, and Hale knew what a struggle it was to hold on to a thought here for more than a couple of seconds—“are—you doing?”
    “I have an ankh,” yelled Hale. “An anchor.”
    “Give it to me.”
    Cassagnac struggled to his feet against the wind, and Hale leaned his weight toward him to reach across and press the hilt of the dagger into the man’s palm.
    “The Russians,” said Cassagnac loudly in his ear, “have certainly fallen back, for dread of this. Start the truck, and take Elena away.” And he climbed one-handed over the rope-topped gunwale and pulled the resistant ankh down with him to the truck bed. Hale stumbled to the gunwale, but he could already see Cassagnac jogging strongly away across the boulevard pavement toward the Western sectors, holding the ankh over his head like a heavy torch.
    “He’s buying our lives,” Hale shouted to Elena. “Get in the truck cab.”
    Elena cast one long, wide-eyed look after the running figure of Cassagnac—and once again, but with obvious deliberateness this time, she made the sign of the cross—then she bit her bleeding lip and nodded, turning away to grip the starboard bow gunwale and swing one leg over it.
    Hale climbed down to the cab, and he was gripping his pistol when he pulled open the left-side driver’s door, but any driver there might have been earlier had long since fled. The truck was vibrating, already idling in neutral, and after Elena had hoisted herself in beside him and pulled her door closed, Hale pressed the clutch to the floor and clanked the gear-shift lever into first gear.
    He let the clutch up, and they were rolling, and he steered toward the curb and the flattened masonry beyond the north side of the Brandenburg Gate. No one was shooting at them yet, and he stamped on the accelerator pedal.
    Hale glanced out the window to the south, and through the whipping veils of hot rain he saw Cassagnac plodding heavily, desperately, toward the western side—but sheets of water were being blown away from the pavement in all directions around the laboring figure, and the whirlwind was slowly bending down over him. Cassagnac lost his footing for a moment, touched the pavement with his knee and free hand as the wind slid him sideways around the compass of the ankh in his fist, and then he was up again, crouching low and thrusting himself forward with each contested step.
    Impulsively Hale shouted out the window, “O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?” —and in the same moment he shifted up into second gear and again tromped the accelerator pedal flat against the floorboards.
    As he had shouted the words at the roaring wind-thing that leaned down out of the sky, he was giving pictures to the ideas behind the words—the Devil fish in the old stained-glass window in Fairford, and a row of soldiers standing resolute, and the boxy litter shape of the Ark of the Covenant as it had appeared in